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One of my goals this year is to take some astro pics of various things – moon, planets, stars, DSOs. And since I have seen people do some amazing things with the same scope as me (NexStar 8SE) and a smartphone, I wanted to try it too. In a previous post, I described it as beginner / entry-level astrophotography (Smartphone astrophotography part 1 – Meade smartphone adapter). I have a Meade adapter to hold the smartphone and some okay eyepieces to use, but getting set up is probably the least of the challenge…while I have managed to get a couple of good shots, I haven’t been very consistent.

I outlined seven steps in my previous post and after fiddling with setups, I managed to mount the phone, adjust the phone to the eyepiece ring, mount the eyepiece, find an object, and adjust the scope’s focus. Five steps down, somewhat mechanical and there’s always likely room for improvement, but it’s good enough for amateur work. Which leaves adjusting the camera settings and snapping the photo or video. If I’m really specific about it, these two actually break into three pieces:

Set the general camera settings

Set the individual image settings

Record the image or video

For iOS phones, you use Night Cap(ture); there are other apps but anyone having any really serious luck with their iPhones and a scope is generally using this app. For Android, the popular choice is Camera FV-5; as with iOS, there are other choices, but most people are defaulting to this app. Both are popular because you can change camera and image settings out the wazoo, which you need in order to get beyond basic settings and into astro-photography configs for low-light.

However, when I looked at the camera settings, I hit a wall. In Camera FV-5, there are *23* settings that could directly impact my type of astrophotos. TWENTY-THREE of them. While the general advice is a bit of trial and error, and making a checklist to run through all the different types of options, 23 is way too many. With all the sub-options, etc., it would be hundreds of permutations. So I needed to triage the list to a more manageable size. I reached out to Lokifish and FlyingSnow on Cloudy Nights, Loren on Cloudy Nights and on FaceBook, and Andrew through Twitter. Most of them are using iPhones, not Android, and different software, but my initial camera questions were a bit more generic than that, not specifically limited to iPhones or Android i.e. not really limited to smartphones. To be honest, I think they are more about astrophotography in general, and in addition to consulting the four people mentioned above, I did a LOT of online searching to find people talking about the same issues. I tried the even tried the RASCAG group too but no nibbles. But with the various avenues, I managed to weed the initial list of 23 down to just 3 to keep for a checklist experiment. If you’re thinking of trying the software, click on the settings icon, and here’s what you will find:

A. Under Basic Settings tab:

Irrelevant: Storage location, custom storage folder, and geotagging are more about your own personal interests, not the outputs, and you might as well turn the composition grid off too.

Mostly irrelevant: I initially set maximize screen brightness to OFF, mainly as a question around preserving my night vision (there’s a lot of white on the screen and no app-based night mode to turn everything red). However, for some darker sky options, I wanted the screen as bright as possible to show any stray photons. It doesn’t affect the photos, just your viewer, so it’s more personal preference.

Relevant: But you SHOULD set Image Resolution to the maximum size you have available as you want as much light and information in the photos as possible. You should also note the maximum size shown as it will be relevant in another section in a minute.

B. Under the General Camera Settings tab:

Irrelevant: Set review last photo, review time, sound (3 sub-options), hardware controls (2 sub-options), use double back key press, and prefer external applications to whatever you want to for personal style, as none of them affect the photos. Anti-banding sounds impressive until you actually see the sub-settings — it is basically about Hz ranges, which might sound relevant until you see that there is a setting for Europe and USA. What is it? It’s so you don’t take a pic of a TV screen and see bands on it. I hit disable.

Mostly irrelevant: Under “compatibility”, you will see six sub-options that are highly technical and their “grouping” doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me. “Keep AE-L/AWB-L after focus and shoots” doesn’t affect photos but it DOES allow you to set them once and keep it set, rather than any resets after each shot. The next three work together — if you use a bracketing procedure (we’ll come to this later but basically it takes three to seven photos at a time, sequentially like a burst, with slightly different exposure compensation), then these three options will affect how well that tool works (i.e. pausing between exposures or not, how long the pause should be, and whether you want it to refocus between shots — generally not for the last one because you’re going to be setting it to infinity later anyway for every shot). You can also set the metadata mode (1,2,3) and while metadata is important when you’re comparing photos, I couldn’t find ANY explanation of what the difference was. “2” seemed to have more info in the file than “1”, but that might have just been coincidence. I set mine to 2. The last sub-option is called “Force usage of legacy camera driver”. I can’t imagine a practical normal reason you would ever want to do that — in almost all cases, older camera drivers are going to have less features and produce worse photos than the current driver. I would make sure it is turned off unless you know a specific reason for your phone’s model in particular that makes you want to switch it. Meanwhile, back under the main settings, there is one called “focus before capturing” but since you’re going to set it later to infinity, it can be switched off. The next option also asks if you can take a photo without focus, which is kind of stupid as it just asked the same question. If I can turn it off, why do I want to ask it again? I switched it on (first one says yes you can take photo, second one says actually take the photo?).

Relevant: The first sub-option under main heading is the only real one that is relevant, and not for the reason that first appears. It is called “Long Exposure Resolution”. Like with Basic Settings / Image Resolution, this is asking you what resolution you should use. Again, for astro photos, you generally want the biggest one you can get with the most detail. So while that seems like a no-brainer, I’m flagging it for another reason. On my phone, my Max Image Resolution is 12MP (chosen in the section above), but my max Long Exposure Resolution is…wait for it…2MP. Why? Because my phone’s camera sucks. I’m using a Galaxy Note 3 that works great for just about everything else but the sensor is so old, it’s going to drastically limit me for certain types of astro photos. It also means that although the software may SAY it’s doing a long 20s exposure, it looks like that is more of a “simulated” long exposure (taking smaller shorter exposures and stacking them together). I’ll cover this in more detail with my actual image reviews, but you should know right up front, if this says you’re limited to a much smaller size, it means your expectations for pics of anything outside our solar system should be limited.

C. Under the Photo Encoding Settings tab:

Irrelevant: Photo storage and numbering (four options) are irrelevant to the image, just personal preference.

Mostly irrelevant: Choosing to embed the thumbnail in the JPG doesn’t affect your image quality, but you may want it when reviewing and sorting photos later. I switched it off, but my consultative advisors recommended leaving it on. And you might as well have best quality (100) for the thumbnail. Similarly, picture orientation (2 options, both of which I leave off) and MetaData (I include EXIF +XMP) are just personal preference.

Relevant: There are four relevant ones left, but two of them are intertwined and obvious. The first one is the file format — on almost all Android phones, this is going to be JPG or PNG. I prefer JPG, doesn’t really matter. What matters is if you have a third option to do RAW. If you do, I am highly jealous. The RAW format is your gold standard and what most hard-core astro-photographers use for imaging. Just like most any other serious photographer for other subjects. But you likely won’t have the option, so choices after that are pretty obvious. If you choose JPG, you will want the highest quality level (again, why not?). The setting, “SET IMAGE PARAMETERS” (for contrast, saturation and sharpness), is actually highly-relevant, and while you only set it once generally, I’m going to cover it in the next post with the image checklist options. Finally, the setting for “COLOR CHANNELS” isn’t as exciting as some astrophotographers might hope. Often, APers, will take shots with Reds, Greens, and Blues separately (no, I don’t know hardly anything about it) to capture different light spectrums and then merge them later. It gives them more granularity of control in the final combined photos. However, this one only has two options — RGB i.e. in colour or Luminance i.e. B/W. While B/W might be tempting, people tend to get more realistic photos in colour.

D. Under the Viewfinder Settings tab:

Irrelevant: This whole section is relatively irrelevant for the images, just your own preferences in working the screen. Widescreen is preferred by some, I tend to leave it off; I check the “DO NOT TURN SCREEN OFF” because it’s annoying in the middle of setting up and checking some info in a book or something to have the phone turn off, reenter the pass code, get it back to where you were. Of course, leaving it on sucks battery life. Since I don’t do image rotation either, I leave the viewfinder in landscape mode on mine.

Mostly irrelevant: Under Viewfinder Overlaps, there are two options that are useful — SHOW STOPS DISPLAY (i.e. exposure compensation) and SHOW CAMERA PARAMETERS (i.e. show your settings on the screen before you snap). Focus Assist sounds like it could be relevant, except you’re not manually focusing with the camera, you’re doing it with the scope. Your phone is set to Infinity.

Relevant: The Histogram settings could be useful, I have no idea how to use them though, so I don’t bother. If you can get a good image of something on your screen, reviewing the histogram would let you tweak it even more, but that is beyond my ken.

And that’s it. All the main options eliminated or set, twenty relevant ones addressed, and only three that carry forward to my next post of testing different things with a checklist approach.

One of my goals this year is to take some astro pics of various things – moon, planets, stars, DSOs. While some people take shots of the sky with just their cameras, in my limited experience, there are four ways to capture images through a telescope.

1. DSLR mounted on the back of the scope (for my setup anyway), looking through the scope;

2. Webcam in the eye-piece;

3. Point-and-shoot camera mounted on the back of the scope and looking through the eyepiece; or,

4. Smartphone mounted at the eyepiece.

Regular Astrophotography

When people talk about astrophotography (AP), they normally mean option 1 or 2.

Option 1 is considered the best option by most amateurs, not because you get the best visuals, but just a combination of cost and quality. DSLRs are awesome machines with proven technology to capture photons. You can even get ones that have modified sensors explicitly to improve capturing night skies with limited light.

Option 2, the webcam, is great if you can afford the high-end cameras but even the lowest end requires another piece of equipment — a laptop to capture what the webcam is seeing. Lots of people debate Option 1 and 2, and while you might get agreement that “technologically” the high-end webcams will produce better output, you’ll likely never get agreement on what is better or easier to work with for a given individual or at a given price-point.

Beginner’s Astrophotography

Option 3 for a point-and-shoot camera was created by people who wanted to take some photos but didn’t have a webcam/laptop or a DSLR. There are little adapters that you mount the camera on, hold it in place over the eyepiece, and bam, you can take a photo. It is, however, highly finicky to adjust everything and get in place to take a shot. I never had much luck with it myself, but I gave it a try, just as I tried the other two above as well. Some people found it just as easy to hold it steady above the EP as anything else.

Option 4 — the smartphone — was basically a simple modification of Option 3 and has grown out of the desire of many people to do exactly what they are doing for regular photography instead of using DSLRs … take shots with the camera they already have on them rather than lugging something else.

Early adopters simply held the smartphone up to the eyepiece, and snapped shots. I’ve done this myself, and got a couple of okay early shots of the moon, but anything else was beyond me. I just can’t hold it steady enough. I also don’t have the patience.

Moderate adopters bought simple adapters that came out from various manufacturers and basically gives a series of little clamps to lock on to your phone in one part and an eye-piece in another. Sounds simple enough, but it’s misleading. For one thing, all phones are different sizes so the phone clamps have to be adjustable i.e. not exactly perfectly sized or lined up. Particularly because some phones put the camera in the corner of the back, others put it in the centre, others in the opposite corner, etc. So after you mount the phone to the adapter, you have to centre a mounting ring over your eyepiece to get it lined up (most newbies make the same mistakes I have done which is to try and centre the camera over the eyepiece rather than first centreing the eyepiece ring over the phone’s camera port, and then adding the EP last).

Current adopters are excited by seeing some of the great work that is out there (like Andrew Symes’ on Twitter — @FailedProtostar) and seeing just what is possible. For these adopters, and to some extent the others, you quickly divide into two camps: iOS users and Android users.

iOS — Those with recent iPhones are blessed with two things. First, the iPhone cameras are good, solid cameras. Are some of the new Google Pixel, or Samsung cameras better? Doesn’t matter, really, the point is that the iPhone cameras are good and have decent abilities to alter the options/settings since night-time photography at a telescope eyepiece is not your “default” setting for any common camera. However, they get a second benefit. There’s an app called Night Cap(ture). It exploits the benefits of the iPhone’s abilities to the max, and just about everyone who uses iPhone for night shots don’t even bother to try anything else. It’s the default go to app, and produces awesome results.

Android — Within the Android world, all the cameras are different: some support API1, some API2; some have great cameras, some have good; some let you play with settings, some don’t; some will save in RAW, most won’t. But even without the variations in the hardware, there is no clear winner in the app world on the scale of Night Cap. If you go by popularity, probably Camera FV-5 comes the closest, and it has lots of power. Although it doesn’t include a video mode, that’s a separate app. Sigh. Anyway, the point is, it’s just not as robust or streamlined as the iOS option. Just about everyone out there who is doing AWESOME stuff out of the gate is using iPhone. Despite the larger Android market share, I would say “awesome smartphone AP” is about 90% iOS and 10% Android.

Enough context, what am I doing?

I tried webcam stuff, but it was something I pushed to the backburner after a few tries, with the intent to focus on visual observing until I felt that I had that well-covered. Five years later, I don’t have it nailed, although the alignment process is fixed. I tried DSLR and have all the parts, just haven’t quite nailed the process and setup yet, but again, put it to the backburner. The point-and-shoot option is still on my list once I nail smartphones as I would like at some point to take four images of the same thing(s) with all four just to show what I can get with a bit of practice and minimal skill.

Which leaves me in the beginner’s AP world of snapping photos at the eyepiece with my Android phone running Camera FV-5. I tried a bunch of other apps, none were even close to giving me what I want on my Samsung Note 4. I can’t save in RAW, but I’m fine with JPGs. I’m aiming more for souvenir web photos than printing enlargements or giant murals. I’m getting a few shots, but nothing spectacular, and it’s hard to figure out where I need to make my improvements. There are x steps in the process.

Mount the phone in the bracket.

Adjust the phone to the right height and angle of the eyepiece ring.

Find an object in the scope.

Mount the eyepiece ring over the eyepiece, thus mounting the camera.

Adjust focus of scope.

Adjust settings for camera.

Snap the photo or record the video.

Step one: Mount the phone in the bracket

That sounds like it should be easy enough, right? Except here’s the deal. I have a Meade smartphone adapter and it basically consists of a “U-shaped” holder, you lie the phone flat in it, and then squeeze the U thinner to pinch the sides of the phone. A small screw knob (1) underneath tightens to hold it perfectly in place. Except there’s a small variance with the next step.

(from bintel.com.au)

Step two: Adjust the phone to the right height and angle of the eyepiece ring.

So here’s the deal…the eyepiece ring has an inner bracket that clamps on to the eyepiece and an outer bracket that connects to the phone bracket. A screw knob (2) holds them together.

To align the phone at the right height above where the eyepiece will be, you use screw knob 2 which allows the phone bracket to move up and down in height about half a centimeter. Screw knob 1, which holds the U together, also allows the horizontal phone to move forward / back and left / right in the bracket to allow it to centre itself over the eyepiece ring.

In other words, you have to keep both knob 1 and knob 2 loose enough to allow movement but tight enough that everything stays together. Grr…

(from Amazon JP)

Step three: Find an object in the scope *

I confess, this is NOT the next step in my process, but I’ll talk about that later.

Usually, this is the normal next step. Pretty straightforward. Locate something in the scope that you want to image, put it in focus, get it tracking if you have a tracking scope.

Again, this is not my usual order, but the standard one. With EP in the scope, and the camera phone mounted on the adapter, you then place the adapter on the eye-piece, tighten it up, and it’s installed. You hope.

Step five: Adjust focus of scope

When you did your initial focus, it was to see the object in the EP. Now that you’ve got a camera a bit above the EP lens, you need to tweak your focus a bit. A friend uses a magnifying glass to make sure his stars are pinpoint sharp. Others eyeball it on the screen as they adjust the focus knob.

Step six: Adjust settings for camera

If the camera isn’t already set for the right settings — infinity focus, duration and ISO — then you can set them now.

Step seven: Snap the photo or record the video

With everything looking perfect on the screen, time to record the video or snap the photo. Since most phones will shake a bit when you touch them, lots of people use a 2 second timer delay for the shaking to stop or a remote trigger or even voice controls.

* My modified steps

I essentially swap steps three and four. Normally you use the EP to find an object and then mount the camera on top. In my case, I have an extra EP, so I first mount the EP I intend to use to the camera and THEN find an object with the other EP. When I am ready, I swap the EP+camera for the spotting EP. Just saves a few steps on the fly and increases the likelihood that my EP will stay attached.

How am I doing?

Not that well. Way back when I started using the adapter last summer, I could get an image like this:

This month, I was lucky to get this:

I tried for Jupiter. Last July, I got this:

This May, I was lucky to get this:

I fiddled, I adjusted, I tried again:

Some people have been doing video and converting, so I did two 10s videos, ran them through an astroimaging software to process them for stacking and then through an actual stacking program, plus converted to JPG. This is the best I have so far:

I moved on to DSOs and got nothing. Totally black images. I checked the sensor to see if it was even registering stars, and I managed to capture Castor:

But it is hardly pinpoint and there is nothing showing around it? Seems odd to me.

So I’m messing up somewhere in the seven steps to get from A to Z. Just not sure where yet. I’ll keep trying.

A little over three weeks ago, I blogged about doing a Year-in-Review book on Shutterfly and submitting, then waiting. The book arrived, and as with a previous book by them, there are some parts that underwhelm. There are a few places where I feel like the printer colour ran a bit. Not enough in this case to send it back (I had the previous one reprinted), just enough to mildly notice.

I was also looking to do a Trip Book for the family trip to B.C. back in 2010. These ones are similar in size to the Year in Review ones, I like the 8.5×11 inches size in landscape mode, but they didn’t have to be identical. And after checking out a bunch of sites, I decided at the end of the post to go with one of Shoppers / Loblaws / Uniprix (they have the same interface software).

Except then I didn’t. I tried loading Costco, just to try it, and this time it worked. Perfectly fine. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Shutterfly, far fewer layouts and themes, or stickers, but still pretty solid. It was however a lot easier to see the full suite of what was available all at once than it is in Shutterfly, where the full list can quickly overwhelm you (20000 backgrounds????).

It is a bit harder to compare the books. The travel book is thinner than the Year ones, but overall, it turned out pretty well. I even found some of it simpler. I’m letting my wife figure out if there is a difference in quality before I do more. The timing with Costco is certainly far more controllable — printed in Canada, picked up in Canada, etc. I got it way faster than the Shutterfly book, and no printing glitches either. But I’d be hard pressed to say the quality of the covers is as solid. Nice, but not quite as good. I just don’t think I care about the difference enough to stay with Shutterfly. However, Shutterfly has some sweet deals regularly, and I don’t think Costco does. Not that I’ve seen so far, anyway.

There is a rule that photographers use to figure out how long of an exposure you can do on a camera before you’ll start to see star trails. This assumes, of course, that you’re not TRYING to get star trails. Instead, you want those lovely little pinpoint stars. The classic rule says you take a set number of 600 and divide it by the effective focal length of the camera lens. If you have a nifty 50 lens, that means you would be able to do about 12 seconds of exposure before streaking occurs.

Most astronomers feel that the 600 number is a little high. More like 500. So then you would say 10 seconds. There’s a small extra factor in there if it is a crop sensor instead of a full-frame, and so for most DSLRs, you have to divide further by 1.6. So the article attached calculates that down to 7.5 seconds.

Perfectly logical, simple math. But as the article points out, that’s not entirely true. The premise is solid though, if you think about it. Let’s say you used one of those big honking 500mm lenses and the rule 500, ignoring the crop sensor. It would say that if you’re going to point it at a small section of the sky, you are so “zoomed in”, that you’re going to see streaks for anything over a 1s exposure.

Now, step back…it shouldn’t matter, right? Why would the focal length affect whether you see streaks? Same camera, same sky, nothing changed except how zoomed in you are. Which means the more “magnified” the image when you take it, the shorter the duration has to be or you will SEE the streaks. The streaks are likely to be there almost no matter what, but with a 500mm lens, you’ll notice them at anything over a second.

Why do I like the article? Because it goes through the math of perception based on how it shows up on the light sensor:

What Can We Conclude?

Streaking starts a LOT sooner than any rule you may have learned.

The time it takes to streak depends on the inter-pixel* distance (sensor density / mm) and the focal length.

How much streaking to allow depends on your aesthetic tolerances.

You can not get more or brighter stars by exposing longer; starlight has already given up on one pixel* and moved on to the next in just a few seconds.

The longer the focal length, the more impossible it becomes to prevent streaking.

Gaps in your star trails may be unavoidable if the inter-shot delay (normally 1 second) is long enough to skip pixels*.

So I posted earlier that my astro season has kicked off, and I’m good to go. With the news that Jupiter was in opposition this week (the closest it will come to Earth all year, hence LOOK NOW for your best view), I thought, “Well, yeah, I want to set up”. And because it’s a PLANET, not some dark sky object, I can do it from my backyard.

So on Tuesday, I was in a hurry to setup before Venus disappeared behind a house, and I wanted to show my wife and son, so I set up the scope on our deck. Anyone who knows scopes knows a deck is a bad idea unless it’s cement. Otherwise they jiggle if anyone walks. Hard to get vibrations out, but whatever. Anyway, got it set up, quick solar system alignment on Venus, good to go, showed the family, all good.

Then I did a quick sky tour, realigned on Procyon and Capella, not bad, and then I started doing a quick sky tour while I waited for Jupiter to come up over a house. Not awesome, but then again, I hadn’t done ANY OF THE PROPER ALIGNMENT THINGS I know I need to do.

Did I put on the vibration suppression pads? No.

Did I set up on actual ground and not a deck that bounces with every move? No.

Did I put in my most accurate time, location, etc.? Nah, general ballpark.

Did I level the scope? Nope.

Did I choose two good stars fairly far apart in the sky with different altitudes? Nope.

Did I do a careful alignment for RIGHT/UP? Yes! I’m not a neanderthal. Well, I mean, I didn’t do the proper doughnut thing to align or use a reticle, I just eyeballed it, but I did do RIGHT/UP at the end.

Anyway, I really wanted to get to some astrophotography of Jupiter. Wasn’t awesome but got a white blob. Wasn’t really expecting anything.

But it was promising enough that I started my “new project” anyway. I have my wife’s old iPhone, and everything I’ve read says iPhones tend to focus better on EPs than Android for their camera design, and the best software on the market seems to be Night Cap(ture) which is only available for iOS. So I decided I would repurpose the phone that is sitting unused, basically an iTouch / iPod at this point, and use it as my dedicated astro camera.

I charged it enough to boot, and discovered I couldn’t go any further without a SIM card. What? I don’t want it as a phone, why do I need a SIM card???? Dang it. Researched ways to bypass, and while there are lots of sites that say you can do it, one of the FIRST steps they say is to borrow another SIM card. Umm, which part of “I DON’T HAVE A SIM CARD DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?”, which is pretty much 75% of the comments on those articles too. Or I could jailbreak it. Or I could find the original SIM card. I called one of the repair places that fixed my tablet, talked to the tech, and he basically said any SIM card for an iPhone should work, and my wife DOES have a new one, soooo…anyway, I tried my Android SIM card first, no joy in Mudville. My wife’s sister had used the phone at one point for a camera on some trip, so she got it working somehow, and turns out she did have a/the card for it, but well, I was impatient. I popped out my wife’s card from her current iPhone, and guess what? They’re totally different sizes. Great. What the hell. I popped it in, and tried to put it in the card slot anyway. No way this should work. It doesn’t even “fit” in right…smaller than the old one.

And the phone moved to the next step. While I held it in place, it let me activate the phone again, register with the app store, all of it. Then I put the SIM card back in my wife’s phone, rebooted, all good there too. Onward!

Found the app store, connected to wifi, went to NIGHT CAP, tried to download, it needed a code from my wife’s account, annoying but manageable, all good to go. Then it tells me NIGHT CAP requires iOS version 10+. The iPhone 4S? Limited to v.7. No joy in mudville.

I tried it in the scope on Wednesday night anyway, and the controls seem just too basic with the stock camera app. Can’t change ANY settings. Sigh. Okay, well then. On to the Android phone.

The best app for the Android is apparently Camera FV-5. I downloaded it, got set up, mounted the Android phone, played with the layout and setup of the physical adapter to figure out the “best way” to align. Went out to the scope, and couldn’t see anything on the screen.

Now I have a good option for this…often the problem is that the scope isn’t “focused” for that EP, and when you do get set up, you can’t go back to look through the EP as it’s now mounted to the phone. So the easy solution was to pick up two cheap EPs at the same magnitude as the other two I want to use…a 25mm and a 15mm. So I can focus with the first 25mm, get it lined up, and seeing “something”, and in the meantime, I can mount the second 25mm to the phone adapter. When I’m ready to take a pic, I just need to swap EPs in and out. I can do the same at the 15mm level if I ever get that good at the basics.

I couldn’t get ANYTHING to work at 15mm. I switched out to 25mm, and again, I was having no end of challenges to get it lined up in the EP. I’ve done this before with the moon, with no trouble, and even on Tuesday night, I could get SOMETHING. Not last night, not at all. Now part of it is a challenge figuring out the app settings, mainly around three parts:

White balance — when you do night shots of the sky using your DSLR, most of the astrophotography sites suggest the tungsten setting (good to get rid of flourescent light normally) as it balances things better. You might have to soften or adjust lighting afterwards, but a good option. Yet I’m not taking a shot of the night sky directly, this is a shot of the EYEPIECE basically. No idea what is the best setting, and my tweaks weren’t producing any noticeable improvements.

Light metering — Which option to use for this is almost anyone’s guess…balanced across the image, focused on the dots that are the planets, moons and stars, or something else entirely?

Focus — for DSLRs on the night sky, you generally want it at “infinity” to be in focus for star points. But this isn’t the sky, again, it is of the EYEPIECE that is basically millimeters from the camera. Do you go Auto? Macro? Infinity? As with metering and balance, tweaking wasn’t giving me any better results.

I posted a question on Cloudy Nights in their Astrophotography area, but no guidance yet.

So I said “screw it”, I’ll just do a bunch of visual observing. And hey, maybe I can try out the Ultrablock that is supposed to knock out man-made light pollution. If it does, I have no way of knowing. My alignment was so far off that at one point, I told it to go to Jupiter, and it pointed to a spot where Jupiter had been almost 90 minutes earlier! It had aligned previously, but then I changed something, replaced a star somewhere and obviously screwed up. Because when I told it to go to Jupiter, and it was off, I manually adjusted to Jupiter’s real location and told it to align again. It thought about it for about half a second and said, “Nope, that’s too big an adjustment for me, not going to do it, try again tomorrow, ya lazy git who didn’t bother to follow the right alignment procedure at the start!”. Okay, maybe the wording was something like “unable to adjust”, but that’s what it meant.

Good thing the star party is tomorrow. I need to do some serious observing with the RIGHT alignment process from the start.

I like using our digital photos for different things — the website, a digital photo frame, some prints around the office, custom calendars, etc. And annual photobooks — a Year-In-Review style that goes month-by-month. Except I’m a bit behind on them, having only completed three or so of the last 13 years worth of organized digital photos that are in my digital gallery. So when I added “Make a Photobook” to my #50by50 list, it wasn’t a specific commitment like “Make a photobook of (someone’s) wedding” or “Make a photobook of a specific trip or year”, it was “knock one off the long list of photobooks you want to do” i.e. get back into making them.

Starting with a Year-In-Review book

Just over two years ago, I took a look at several websites that offer do-it-yourself photobooks, and I gave a bunch a try. Some of them failed for software limitations, others for their variable quality. I pretty much ended up going strictly with Shutterfly in the end. For my new YIR book, I thought I might as well start with Shutterfly again.

Shutterfly is a solid site overall, with all the basics plus some bells and whistles. They have regular coupon deals, established history, and I can reuse/copy old projects to incrementally improve each year while keeping some basic consistency. And lots of extra product possibilities like mousepads, notepads, notebooks, magnets, mugs, etc. I re-familiarized myself with the site and didn’t see any major changes in the functionality of the web design in the last two years, still no downloadable software to do it and then upload as one piece but rather still just all online, and the default templates for “years in review” are still not particularly attractive (only two main defaults from which to choose). Still, a solid choice. There are e-share options too, but I’m not particularly attracted to them nor do I need the option since I have my own photo gallery site with more content than would go in the books.

I bit the bullet. I put together a year in review (or actually a partial year in review) for the second half of 2010. In so doing though, I wanted to revisit the basic design of their template and see if I could create a new master template that I could reuse for future YIRs. Some of it was quite simple — adding background colours, putting in the months of the year, making sure every month has at least four pages to start with, etc. It took me most of a day to put the template in some form that I could call a “master” draft to build from for the future, but I only have to do it once and it probably took me longer as I was coming back “new” to the software/website. I then copied it over to a new project for a backup. And then used that to create “2010 – Book 2”.

Choosing the photos is a bit more of an iterative process than one might think. Here’s my general work-flow:

a. I copy all the photos from Andrea’s phone, the compact point-and-shoot camera, my phone, my tablet (rare), and the DSLR, plus any that others happened to send us of shared events into a set of photos by month;

b. I then sort them into days and events;

c. I pick the best ones for uploading, sending everything else into sub-folders called “extras”, keeping about one for every 2-3 that go in the extras folder (I don’t delete photos unless they’re blurry or technically wrong for some other eason…I’ve gone back too many times to a photo that was perhaps good for everyone, but in looking at the extras, I find one that is GREAT for a specific person, allowing me to crop it to just them);

d. For a Photobook, I start with the web choices, and weed it down to a smaller list of possibles, and then let Andrea weed even further.

I uploaded the weeded set to Shutterfly and the template worked almost perfectly. A couple of little tweaks here and there, but not enough to warrant changing the master, more tweaks for colouring with the photos I was laying out in the template. I added some prose, chose some photos for the covers and inside page, and bam! I submitted the book with a 50% off coupon. Sweet.

Now I just have to wait.

Considering a Trip Book

I’m willing to experiment with other sites, just to try them out, and I’m going with some trips as the theme. But which one to try?

a. MixBook

Last time I tried Mixbook, the software was a bit unwieldy. This time, I found 11 templates for “Year in Review” style books. The Minimalist style was a bit black and white, but cute; Linen / Vintage / Colourful YIR / A Year to Remember / Year in Review / My Year Magazine / Graduation Year in Review / Watercolour Year in Review are all more thematic or event-driven than I would like. The one called Family Yearbook would be an awesome style for people with multiple kids and I could see easy ways to adapt it. However, the Kraft Year in Review is outright awesome. Simple chronological design, exactly what I am looking for in YIR-style without weird or wonky titles for each month. My only complaint is it is a bit drab … most of the layouts could benefit from a bit more colour per page. The software seemed to work okay, and as with most, you do a lot better with everything pre-chosen before you start. Definitely a viable option, and an improvement over previous attempts.

b. Costco

Since the last time I tried, CostCo has updated their software and their book builder looks a little better, albeit somewhat slow to get it to click over to the “ready” stage. Or more specifically, it goes off to “prepare” the book for editing and never returns. Just sits and “spins” that it is doing something and never finishes. Maybe it doesn’t like Firefox, maybe the site is busy, I don’t know. Pass.

c. Shoppers Drug Mart

The software seems better this time than last, and I was able to navigate through a few choices to get to a reasonable option for a book. I chose their one and only Year in Review template, and it isn’t bad. The overall layout and control options are much more basic than other sites, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing — some of the others are a bit overkill. Definitely a viable option I might consider.

d. Loblaws

If you go to the Loblaws site, you won’t find their photo book options because their photo service is separate — aka Photolab.ca. And it looks surprisingly familiar. Like with my previous review, Loblaws has the exact same software as Shoppers Drug Mart for their site, it just has a different name. But functionality, templates, etc are the same. So again, a viable option.

e. Uniprix

I wasn’t overly impressed the last time I tried the UniPrix site, but a friend suggested I give it another try, as he had good luck with it. So I gave it a go. Like SDM and Loblaws, it has some basic options, nothing extravagant. And while the opening interface is different, the final operations are almost identical for the software with Loblaws and SDM. A few differences, for sure, but functionally the same.

f. Blurb

PhotoBookGirl is an online reviewer of photobook designs, and she has a bunch of reviews of different photo sites (mainly in the U.S.), so I wanted to give a few of them a try too. Blurb was up first. Blurb has some amazing options to upload a PDF and to sell things onwards into Amazon, but that’s not my focus. When Blurb Bookify starts, you get to the editing options pretty quick but that’s because the main options of other sites — draft templates, layouts, etc. — are all missing. Pass.

g. Bookemon

Like Blurb, it has options to create a book for sale — including kids books, etc. But the templates that come with it, and the basic interface are a bit too menu driven and mechanical than designed to populate things for you. Pass.

h. Clark Color Labs

The software for CCL is pretty clean. I set up an account easily, uploaded some photos pretty fast, and wandered through their templates. I’m looking for Year In Review designs, and while there weren’t many (only 3), they were all quite vibrant in colour. A very different look and feel to the template than Shutterfly or even Mixbook. The only challenge was that some of the months were set for a single page, others were spread over two, with no rhyme or reason. Plus there didn’t seem to be a reason why in some months they chose to put the name of the month on the page and others just a symbol (St. Patrick’s Day images for March, for example). Where they make up for some of it though is in their easy to access clipart. On a lot of sites, it is hard to find good clip art to add to the layout, but they make it pretty easy, and it was easy to add the months of the year for example or change a background. Overall a pretty simple and direct option. I have no idea if the quality out the other end is any good, but it’s a pretty nice site.

i. Picaboo

The site has some power, no doubt, and if you want to start from a very minimalist book layout, it’s a great choice. There are only five main themes, variations on “white”, but no choice between a year in revew or a trip or graduation. You can add all that, but you start with a blank template. Not a problem, but why would I want to do all that extra work unless I was starting with a very unique project? Pass.

j. Snapfish

Upfront, Snapfish has some great opening choices in sizes. I’m mainly interested in the landscape 8 x 11 books, but there were quite a few other choices too. When I chose YIR, just because it is an easy way to decide if it’s viable or not, eight sample templates came up. Most of them are comparable to the Shutterfly and Mixbook options, so nothing to really sell me there. Clicking on “Travel” pulled up another 12 options. One of them was called Road Trip (which a lot of my trips are), and pre-organized around Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, etc. So a viable option again.

So that gives me a full dozen options, including the original Shutterfly.

However, there is one small feature I like about the Shoppers / Loblaws / Uniprix option. I can print it and pick it up. No shipping required. And while I can’t guarantee the quality until I try it, it’s also not likely being shipped off to the lowest common producer elsewhere. There is a bit of local production involved. I hope at least. So I’ll try one of those three first.

I’ll see how it goes and update later. In the meantime, I’m waiting for my YIR book for 2010.

My annual renewal date for my SmugMug account is in May, and I wanted everything done by then.

I did all the uploading. I added the captions. I tested the videos and replaced the ones that didn’t work with converted formats. I sorted and organized the order in each album. And then I re-linked everything to the blog articles that had photos in them. I also found some time in there to tweak the organization as I went, like moving cooking ones into a separate folder and doing virtual links back to the regular folders, adding in a lot of my humour and TV review photos even if they don’t need captions, etc.

It took a bit of time. Two months in fact. And it’s now DONE. Well at least that portion of it.

As I went, I got ideas for some blog entries. Plus some other ideas for uses of my photos. Found a few errors in other parts of the website. So I had to noted them on my update list, and some day I’ll get to them. Maybe now I can rest from the website work for a bit and then start on doing a few photobooks. 🙂

And just to close out the project? I closed and deleted my commercial account. RIP SmugMug, you served me well, but it’s time I saw other websites (like my own that is comparatively free).

One of the things I do with my photos, besides having them in a gallery, is embed them in various posts in my WordPress blog. For example, I have a section on the site dealing with an HR student conference from back in 2002, and I have a small album of photos with the conference docs. Those photos are stored with my Piwigo gallery, and embedded as a hot link in the WordPress pages. Simple, right?. But here’s the problem. The link to each photo currently says:

http://thepandafamily.smugmug.com/yada yada yada

Now that I have the new gallery up and running, if I simply delete the old one, those links won’t work. I have to change ALL of them to say:

http://www.polywogg.ca/pandafamily/yada yada yada

It isn’t a huge challenge, just under 100 posts in total with maybe 400 photos linked. But each photo or video link has to have the SmugMug link deleted and the Piwigo link pasted BEFORE I delete the SmugMug account. If I don’t do it first, then my WordPress site will suddenly have a bunch of broken links all through it and no photos showing from my gallery.

But of course it isn’t as simple as just a search and replace of the opening domain info — the “yada yada yada” is completely different for each site. So they have to be done manually. Since it is easier to do while the two galleries are both running, i.e. so I can view them side-by-side on the screen and copy the links from the new to replace the old, it is still a pain in the patootie. With the uploading and captioning done, I’m about 50% done the re-linking process. But I got my account renewal reminder the other day … SmugMug renews in less than a month and I wanted to be done before then so I won’t get charged for another year.

I did the first few, and they were easy-peasy. So I thought the “rest” would be the same. Strange, but I feel like it was both less work and more work than I expected. How can that be?

Well, I feel like there were “only 98” posts with the cross-linked photos, which seemed like a manageable number. In addition, many of them only had one or two photos, so pretty quick. All in all, that meant I was initially feeling like it was less work than I expected and would go pretty fast.

Right up until I hit some of the photo-rich posts like stories about Being Jacob’s father or various trips we took. Some of them took a LONG time to update. But the weird part is I feel like the photos are somehow “brighter”? That’s weird. I wonder if the filters and themes at Smugmug that I was using were muted somehow. Anyway, I really like how it looks now.

And I’m finally done. It took a bit of time, maybe 6 or 7 hours in total to do the updating of the 98 posts, although in fairness, some of that was because I was sucked into reading my own posts again and editing a bit as I went. 🙂

I was right, uploading took a whack of time. I also don’t much like one aspect of the upload window — if something “fails”, it gives you an error while the screen is still uploading so you can see it, but once the rest of the uploads are done, it just rolls over to a new screen showing the successful uploads. No continued error message to say “64 uploaded, 2 didn’t”. So I wasn’t monitoring as I went, and later in the subsequent phases, I’ve discovered “missing” photos and videos i.e. ones that for some reason didn’t upload successfully the first time. Not a huge problem to fix, just annoying. If the result page showed the “failed” ones, I would have fixed immediately upon upload.

I also underestimated the final size. I thought about 10K in photos, which is about right for the family photos. But with everything else on the site, there are actually 14,147 photos, 500 albums, 24 plugins and 25.1 GB of data. Wow. But that part is “done” (small caveat — there are a few months where there are some special photo collections my wife took, so I’ll need her to figure out which ones of those should be included).

Phase II: Preparing the folders and pictures for viewing

While uploading took time, it was generally mindless, something I could spend a few minutes sorting and adding in the ones to upload, and then clicking the button to start. It could take 60 seconds, or 10 minutes, depending on how many pics or how long of videos, but it was background computer stuff while I do other things.

But once the upload was complete, I also had to start playing with the files and albums online to make them presentable. Oddly enough, one of the first things I had to do is tell it to generate all the “little” thumbnail and square size photos in the background. It does it fast enough, the server I mean, while I wait. Another background task. But I need it done because the second step is to play with the display order, and while doing that, I need to be able to move files around by looking at their little thumbnails. But once uploaded, it’s ON the website, not within a file browser, so there’s no “viewing processor” running to let me see it easily. Instead, the website creates the little thumbnails as extra files and then displays them for manipulation.

In an easier world, the photos I was uploading would all have the exact same filenaming taxonomy, and thus once uploaded, I could sort by the creation date (for example) and everything would be in order.

Except some of the pics come from my DSLR. Others come from Andrea’s iPhone. Others come from a small pocket camera. And still others come from two different apps in my Android phone. Which means they all have their own filenaming convention, and they don’t “sort” easily. And if I edited them at all on the computer, with a crop for example, often the software changes the metainfo so that the file creation date is the date I did the editing, not the original “taken” date. Don’t even get me started on images sent to me by other people where they’ve named them “Dave and Janet at the lake” and then “At the lake with Dave and Janet”. The anal-retentive side of me wanted to impose a filenaming convention, sort them all, get them looking identical, and then upload.

But that is way overkill when it takes me 60 seconds of viewing on my desktop to decide on which photo I’m looking for in a batch. This isn’t a “shared” server where we all have to use the same convention. Ultimately I don’t care what the filename is, other than for quick reference. But, since I can’t rely on the filename or the creation date, I do a manual sort. Most of the time, I do a default filename sort plus the original upload order, and then I just move a few things around. Like putting all the photos of Uncle Dave together, even if I took a couple of other people in between.

However, merely putting them in a good order is not necessarily the biggest job. In most cases, since I already had a working gallery elsewhere, with the same photos already uploaded there (alas, I couldn’t transfer directly), most of the time I’m just matching the new gallery’s order to the old gallery’s order. So, again, most of the time, the order isn’t that time consuming. But for some reason, one of the ones I did today was brutal (about 75 photos in the middle of the batch didn’t get uploaded, and when I did upload them, it gave me a huge batch at the end of the collection that had to be moved — one by one — up to the right space).

At this point, I had a gallery with pictures and videos in them, sounds good, right? Except they had no captions. I mentioned in an earlier post that I was annoyed that I had to put the same info twice in the meta data — once for title so it would appear on the album page, and once for description so it would appear on the single photo pages. I reached out to the Piwigo community, and heard nothing back over the course of a week or two. Okay, I guessed I would have to paste it twice. Then it occurred to me. I had chosen a theme where I *should* be able to alter this in the template, but in reading the template files, I couldn’t find the fields to change. I was looking for something called TITLE or NAME and DESCRIPTION, since that is what the admin pages call them. So I posted on the discussion page for my particular theme, hoping successfully that the creator of the theme would respond.

Which he did. Except his first response was “Good idea, make it a plugin and upload it to the repository”. Except if I *could* do that level of techno programming, I would have already done it. I couldn’t even FIND the fields to work with. So I went looking again, and found two rows of code that looked promising and I posted an update to my question:

So I found picture. tpl, and the refs to description include:

data-description=”{$thumbnail.DESCRIPTION}”

in two places. I could change that to $thumbnail.NAME. That would be telling it that the description never gets displayed, I think, just that the field will be the name/title field. It also exists in index.TPL

Although perhaps I’d be better off trying it as “data-description=”{$thumbnail.NAME}” & “{$thumbnail.DESCRIPTION}” ??

My thought was either to change the template to always show just the TITLE field in both album and picture pages, OR to do a little replacement code to tell it that when it went to display the description, to just first copy the text from the TITLE into it. So either show the title or copy the title into the description and then show the description. Either way, the title would show. Or so I thought. Turns out I was TOTALLY off-base.

The text below the main image is set in [Github] piwigo-bootstrap-darkroom file template/picture.tpl@L38

No idea why the variable is called $COMMENT_IMG, but it’s the description. If you replace the two $COMMENT_IMGs with $current.TITLE it should do what you want for now.

The data-description stuff is for the PhotoSwipe slideshow.

Of course. The title / description is called COMMENT. Which are not to be confused with the actual comment fields. While the TITLE field means something else. Why didn’t I figure that out on my own? 🙂

Who cares in the end? Not me, cuz I made the tweaks and damned if it didn’t work EXACTLY the way I wanted it to do. Fan-freaking- tastic! No more entering the captions twice. Whew!

Now I still had to set captions for about 10,000 photos, and while some of those were done in batches (i.e. multiple photos with the exact same caption like “Small deer at Parc Omega”), others were variations on a theme (“Day 06 – Trip to Cozumel – Water park” or “Day 06 – Trip to Cozumel – Lighthouse”). Others were individual. A fair amount of work.

The last two things I had to do before each album was ready was to test all the photos and videos to make sure they display or play properly (once in a while, a video wouldn’t play, or I had audio but no video, or the picture was upside down), and then, when all was ready, choose an image from the batch to serve as the image for the album cover.

Generate thumbnails, sort the photos, fix the captions, test the viewing, and choose a cover image. It went a lot faster than I initially thought, but it could not be done quickly or in the background. I had some decent processes in place for a good workflow, but it still required me to do a lot of the grunt work manually.

I finally finished after about two months of work, doing a few albums at a time.

In my previous posts, I talked about the desire to switch from paying for a commercial photo gallery and instead hosting it on my own site; testing out a bunch of plugins and options to embed the photo gallery directly into my WordPress site (i.e. this blog) rather than hosting separately; figuring out problems with Piwigo plugins to make sure I could get it to work with photos AND video together; and finally working through a bunch of options around theme choices and a challenge with my layouts.

Generally, after all that, it puts me in the world of having a working gallery. Or more accurately, a shell of a gallery. I still have to populate it. This is going to fall into four main phases, and it isn’t exactly “light” work. It is pure, unadulterated grunt duty.

Phase 1: Upload my files

Sure, upload my files. Sounds easy enough, right? But we’re not talking about a click-and-upload solution with one fell swoop. There are some options to do that, but it does mean spending a lot of time to either set up a separate set of files (my stored photos on my harddrive go chronologically, and includes subfolders both for photos I want to upload and subfolders for the “also ran” pics that are either duplicates of other shots, or someone is squinting, or whatever). I do occasionally go back to them looking for good shots where, say, Jacob looks awesome in the photo, but I need to crop out two other people. Not worth the effort for a standard upload, but if I was looking for a good shot of JUST Jacob, then I’ll look through the extra photos too. Which means unlike some ruthless digiterati, I don’t just delete those extra shots. To give you an idea of volume, some of my uploads in a year might be 1000 photos over the course of multiple weddings, trips, day to day events, etc. But that likely represents 3000-4000 photos and videos in total. Call it 1 in 3 or 4 that are good enough to share. Why does that matter? Because I can’t just click a single folder and upload everything in it. 75% of the photos don’t get uploaded, so it’s a bit more manual of a process. They’re all presorted, I’m not redoing that work, but it isn’t as simple as clicking a root folder and uploading everything under it.

I downloaded DigiCam as a photo manager as it has an option for uploading photos directly, but it was only marginally better than doing it by hand in a web browser, with a couple of bad work process things too (dangers of “synching” and losing stuff).

So I’m uploading. Since I’m going back to 2005, plus I have other types of photos in there (memes, comics, HR charts, a few other things that only I can see for work purposes), it will likely top out somewhere around 10K photos and videos by the time I’m done. Stored in approximately 250-400 subfolders, depending on how I organize them.